Page 17 of The Refiner

I don’t have time to argue with her. I just need to know what’s wrong with Piper. “What hospital?” I’m already in the car, backing out of the driveway when she rattles off the address, and Remington rushes out the door, his face redder than the ink Keys used to write me all those hate letters.

This will be a good lesson for Remington. All the time he’s spent with us has made him soft. He would have never left his keys in the car before meeting Halle and my brother. The posh lifestyle has made him too trusting, which I’m sure he will adjust after today. But it was an emergency. I didn’t have time to go inside and get the keys to my car. I need to get to Piper quickly.

If she…

I can’t even finish the thought. She’s fine. Being a doctor has conditioned me to expect the worst. But this is Piper we’re talking about. She’s one of the strongest women I know. She won’t go down without a fight.

Whatever this is, it’s fixable.

We’re surgeons, for fuck’s sake.

We can fix anything.

Keagan

“Piper, don’t be such a prude! Take your shirt off.”

For the past three minutes, all Piper has been able to do is make excuses and wring out her hands. I get it, she’s nervous, but this was her idea.

“This isn’t a date, P-Titty. Your insides aren’t going to turn into a puddle of goo, and the only tingling your skin is going to feel is the zapping of V’s tattoo gun.”

I shove my sister into the vinyl table. “Do not act shy about this. I’ve seen you do the running man in a bikini atop a rickety coffee table. Do not act all modest now. Venom doesn’t give a shit about your padded bra, do ya, V?”

Piper steadies herself and stands, cutting me a nasty look. “I can’t believe I agreed to this.”

The deep rumble of laughter from the man who calls himself Venom, our tattoo artist, makes me smile. So does the large chip in the wall that looks like a make-shift glory hole, complete with a white substance that dried as it dripped down the wall once upon a nasty time.

“This place is disgusting, Keys. Couldn’t you have picked somewhere a little less HIV positive?”

I could have, but where would have been the fun in that? Piper said we could get matching tattoos for my eighteenth birthday. I wasn’t about to give her time to change her mind. I also wasn’t allowing her to ruin this moment with a sterile setting and a boring guy named Josh doing our tattoos. I wanted a birthday to remember, and Venom, with his orange and pink mohawk, looked to fit the part.

“Piper, getting a matching tattoo for my birthday is a once-in-a-lifetime occasion. We can’t get it somewhere nice.”

I shrug and take a step back. Piper looks like she’s about to grab me and sprint for the car.

“Okay,” I try to explain, “I’ll admit, Ink Stainz is probably a low-key cesspool of diseases that the CDC has yet to classify, but you only live once, am I right?”

A tear drips onto Piper’s hand. She didn’t remove her shirt that day. She couldn’t bear for Venom to put the matching tattoo on her ribs like I did. Instead, she chose her inner wrist where her watch would cover it.

But her watch doesn’t cover it today.

Today, that sweet Bible verse we tattooed on ourselves years ago stares back at me, mocking our stupidity.

Ruth: 1:16-17

How dare we think we would always be together—that we would never be separated? That even death couldn’t keep us apart.

But it will.

Because death took my parents. Death taught me what it felt like to truly feel alone. To fear an unknown future without a family to support you—to be there for you when you fucked everything up. Death taught me to work hard, to make sure I didn’t fail because failing was the end. There are no do-overs when you’re broke and have nothing to fall back on. All you can do is climb and hope you find something to hold onto.

Death is a dream killer.

For Piper, her dream of hearing her daughter call her mama is gone. So is the dream of seeing her take her first steps and get married. The career she worked so hard for is gone, snatched right out of her grip. All those years she spent taking care of me, using her downtime from school to work, so I had school supplies and lunch. It was all time she could never get back. Time she can never fill forher—for her daughter.

My sister sacrificed everything for others to have a better life.

And when she finally started doing things for herself, death took all her possibilities.

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